This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

A good way to assess the happiness or misery of people living in the different regions of England is to examine what social scientists call “Deaths of Despair”. This is the collective term for those who die because of suicide, drugs or alcohol, which is something that is more than twice as likely to happen in the North East of England than in London.

Anguish and self-destruction may be caused by social deprivation, unemployment, poor job expectations, debt and other factors, but the excess deaths are concentrated in the North, according to a study of Deaths of Despair in England over two years. The 10 cities with the greatest mortality are all in the North with Blackpool, Middlesborough and Hartlepool suffering the heaviest loss of life.

Other statistics tell the same grim story with the 15.5 million Britons in the North East, North West, and the Yorkshire and the Humber regions having a life expectancy nearly two years lower than the country as a whole. When it comes to regional economic inequalities, the UK is the fourth highest out of 38 OECD countries.

This forbidding North-South divide in Britain did not happen solely by an unfortunate quirk of history, nor was it wholly inevitable. Other wealthy countries have deindustrialised, but in Britain the process was particularly brutal and took place without mitigation during the 1980s and 1990s. People in parts of ex-coal mining districts like Blyth in Northumberland or in Eccles in Greater Manchester still sound shell-shocked by an experience that tore their lives apart, like being on the losing side in a hard-fought war.

Whatever the degree of intent, the British state presided over a man-made disaster that still has a profound, negative and long-lasting impact on people’s lives almost half a century after the event. Sir Paul Collier, the development economist and author of Left Behind, says that the story “begins in 1979 when the Treasury removed all exchange controls, triggering a sharp appreciation in the currency…Manufacturing exports concentrated in the regional cities were severely hit, while the international banking, concentrated in London, gained a bonanza”. The North was progressively stripped of political power, as well as economic........

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